It goes hand in hand. We need to fight for privacy in order to have direct democracy
It is burning in part because any organized movement against social or economy change that is big enough is stop by interference by the government. You can't organize a blockade of streets or a riot it the FBI is in every chat that you use to organize a group of activists.
People join massive protest all around the world for these things. They are willing to spend a day walking around and yelling even if it is an inconvenience.
It is lack of organizing and having a trust that if we just vote for right politician it will be solved. For decades of elections, nothing changed.
We need to organize ourselves as the people, like they do in some countries. Stop the traffic, organize in shifts to stay on road blocking all gas powered trucks. You need to stop businesses from operating normally to give the system some reason to change, instead of just ignoring us and promising us that next election it will be better.
Same for soical media, do the internet equivalent of blockades, DDOS them like anonymous did. They can't arrest us all. And organize to block police cars when they try to make an example of the few.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." ― Edward Snowden
I don't agree, whenever I take someones phone and start reading their private messages or browsing history, they always get nervous, even if I can't find anything.
People certainly care, even an average person is aware of problems with digital privacy and they would love to get it solved. But people care about a lot of things, global warming, homelessness, police brutality, they just don't organize well enough to fight those issues and fighting them alone is hard.
Also don't forget the amount of propaganda there is to live a certain way, to chase promotions on your job, earn more money and have a high social status. All of these things get in the way of deleting instagram,whatsup and etc.
There is also a problem with lack of marketing of alternatives, most people haven't heard of lemmy or XMPP chat.
I suggest we try to get people to start using these alternatives first, until there are enough users that they actually have a choice to choose either network and then a lot of people will delete mainstream apps. First step is to make it popular, second is to delete these bad apps. However even getting someone to use a new app is hard, since they are bombarded everyday to install some new app and are even financially motivated (with deals and discounts).
It is a hard battle, but a necessary one. Without privacy there is no democracy, voting is secret for a reason. We need a real democracy, where we choose laws directly, not by someone else we are forced to vote for due too lack of better choice. That requires safe and private digital communications. In person communication is very limited.
I think we can be more certain that they can't afford losing all workers on a strike, then that they can't possibly cut down on CEO's salary and let workers keep the jobs.
Also I think that the very fact that if companies workers are not in a union, they are more likely to make risky decisions, such as these, to expand too fast and risk losing all the works when they go on a strike.
XMPP is decentralized, you can run your own server. In open decentralized protocols, such issues are resolved by design. Further more most XMPP servers don't require a phone number, why would they, unlike Signal.
Briar is an app that is just as easy to use, plus you dont need a phone number, so it is easier. Yet it has no point of failure and it was simpler to write. It is P2P, uses tor, you dont get better privacy and security than that.
You dont know what their server is running, you cant prove that. They can release the code, but you have to trust them that they are running that exact code.
Ease of use is an excuse, they have a centralized model. That is a big flaw. There is more to security then E2E, xmpp clients have E2E as well, they use the same algorithm.
I use gpg to encrypt my passwords with my public key. Benefit is that adding credentials to a new file doesn't require me to type the master password (password for private key). I trust gpg the most for security.
If voting worked, we would have solved this issue decades ago. You can vote for whomever you want, but at the end, no matter what they promise, they always end up doing nothing at all, because they are elected by using big oil donations.
Only a self-organized revolution can stop this madness, people in some nations are already blocking oil tankers and oil rigs. We can't win by only voting, you can vote for a day every few years, but we need to fight this everyday. Take turns blocking streets so no oil driven trucks and cars pass, only this will make an effect.
Email is federated as well, but I never saw anything I could call email instance wars. You can use whichever you want, no one really cares.
I think people often forget federation is not a new thing, it's a first design for internet communication services. Email, which is predating the Internet, is also federated network and most popular widely adopted of them all modes of Internet communication. It also had spam issues and there where many solutions for that case.
The one I liked the most was hashcash, since it requires not trust. It's the first proof-of-work system and it was an inspiration to blockchains.